Have you spent autumn’s chilly Saturdays sipping tea by the fire and thinking, “Where the heck does the apostrophe go in the upcoming Veterans Day, and should there be one at all?”
When it comes to Presidents’ Day, the situation gets even messier.
Presidents’ Day is not a federally observed holiday. The holiday in Washington, D.C. has always been called “Washington’s Birthday.” “Presidents’ Day” was actually made up by retailers and advertisers in the 1970s. What happened was that in 1968, “Washington’s Birthday” was moved to the third Monday in February by the federal Monday Holiday Law. At the time, an Illinois congressman proposed changing the name to “Presidents’ Day,” but his suggestion failed.
However, after the Monday Holiday Law officially took effect in 1971, certain individual states started calling it “Presidents’ Day,” and so did your friendly neighborhood malls.
There’s an urban myth that Richard Nixon is responsible for the error (doesn’t he get blamed for everything?) The reason Nixon got blamed for this particular confusion is that five years ago, Bill Clinton mistakenly referred to “Presidents’ Day” in a public proclamation. Arkansas Democrat Gazette humor columnist Michael Storey joked around in his humor column that Nixon had made the same goofup in 1971, declaring, “Pat and I plan to celebrate at one of many Presidents’ Day sales, purchasing for her a good Republican cloth coat.”
Apparently, the print media took Storey’s column seriously and repeated the bogus tale, and the myth made its way into places like Wikipedia.
“So much has been made of a holiday that not only has no official spelling, it does not exist,” Storey told me earlier this year.
The Government Printing Office’s long Style Manual does refer to the faux holiday. It lists the spelling as “Presidents Day.” But various other government websites call it “Presidents’.”
When asked about this, GPO spokeswoman Lydia Holt said, “The versions [for Presidents and Veterans] were chosen by applying the rules of Chapter 8, specifically rules 8.18 through 8.3. The ‘s’ makes them plural and possession is not involved.”
Yeah, okay. But Webster’s Dictionary includes the apostrophe!
There’s a bright side
Fear not – there’s the good news in all of this. The federal government is saving you money.
The decisions made in private industry prove it. Loews Theaters dropped their apostrophe after Larry Tisch took over the company in 1969.
“It was considered unnecessary by Mr. Tisch,” a company publicist explained earlier this year, “[and] it made all the printing more expensive.”
So the lack of an apostrophe in Veterans and sometimes in Presidents saves ink and cash.
Let’s agree on this: Veterans Day should have no apostrophe because the government says so. Presidents’ Day maybe gets to keep it because grammarians like it that way. Mother’s Day is a day for each wonderful mother. And what of driver’s license?
The governments of New York, Texas, and several other states avoid confusion by calling the cards “drivER licenses.”
Brilliant! Now if they can only fix the potholes. This piece originally appeared on the web at www.blacktable.com.